Carmageddon's Stainless Games shares the secrets of its Kickstarter success

Stainless Games, which recently funded a "reincarnation" of its
mid-90s ultra-violent driving sim Carmageddonover Kickstarter, shared a few tips for crowdfunding success on
stage at the Rezzed conference in Brighton.

It's been 15 years since Carmageddon was released amid
massive media controversy in Britain. The game was even condemned
by the Pope. The remake significantly revamps the graphics
of the original but doesn't change too much else -- the same game
modes, mechanics and ultraviolence will all be present and
correct.

"We came out asking for 400,000 dollars, which is a lot of
money, and we ended up recieving over 600,000," said Ben Gunstone
from Stainless Games, sharing the following tips for Kickstarter
success.

1. Deliver something that people want
"We'd been monitoring Kickstarter for a while as a potential
source of funding because the big corporate publishers were
ignoring games that gamers wanted to play," said Gunstone. "We
spent some time getting a video together and getting rewards set
up," he said, but insisted that the most important factor in
getting funding was giving people something that they already
wanted -- a remake of Carmageddon.

2. Stay in touch
"The first day, $80,000 was pledged," said Gunstone, "Day two,
$60,000." After that, however, it started to drop, and by day 10 it
was just $7,000. The team had to change their original plan of not
cramming the campaign with updates (over fear of spamming people),
and instead shifted to a model of publishing updates on alternating
days. "We posted every other day, even on weekends, which had a
very positive effect in the end."

3. Promote it in other places
"One crucial thing we did was really get in contact with the
fans," said Gunstone. The original game's creators did an Ask-me-anything post on Reddit, and the team pursued fans of
the series all over the rest of the web to make them aware of the
campaign to remake it. Even the Daily Mail, who had
campaigned so vehemently against the original, gave it a mention in
their pages. "We were very very happy that they did," said
Gunstone.

4. Augment the experience
Stainless promised, if $600,000 was raised, to code Mac and Linux
versions of the remake, as well as the PC edition, which Gunstone
said may have accounted for a chunk of the pledges. The developer
also promised to make iOS and Android versions of the original
game, which will arrive in Q3 2012. "We agreed to make it free for
24 hours on the App Store when it launches, as a thank you to our
Kickstarter pledgers for helping out," said Gunstone.

5. Upgrade your backers over time
Finally, try and get people who've already pledged to pledge more.
Gunstone said they saw a trend of people who had pledged the
minimum amount upgrading their donation over time as they got more
excited about the game. When the team announced a release of the original on Good Old Games, free to
those who'd pledged above a certain amount, that brought a large
spike in upgraded donations.